


Echolalia

by Laegwen



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Adventure, F/F, F/M, Fantasy, Romance, elves being merry, lots of fruit symbolism, maybe some magic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-06-30 12:09:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19852888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laegwen/pseuds/Laegwen
Summary: In the long entrancement of summer Legolas and Eroth journey across Rhovanion to find the mysterious River-daughter, but away from the deep forest where they grew up all things are set to change.'Coming up for air with the yellow lily draped around her fingers, she looked at him silent with sun-stained eyes. First in horror, as if she had expected never to see him again, then like she was about to smile, as if she had been waiting patiently for him all this time. He had known her for centuries. Time enough for a moral lineage to fall into ruin. Yet here, Eroth puzzled him violently.'





	1. The Water Ripples

**Chapter 1 – The Water Ripples**

It was a bright day in midsummer, with a pinkish light over the old trees, when they came across the locket. It was a beautiful little thing on a chain, its lid glossed over, with the portrait of an immortal upon it. Her hair was wound into a plait around her head like tamed sun-rays. She was holding up her hands, and inside her hands nestled a silver circle of water.

When Eroth found this she and Legolas had been dozing on the grassy slopes, dreaming peculiar elvish-dreams, and guessing at one another’s from the last glimmers of fancies which had not yet fled. The forest felt deep and wide, the mystery of their being was still endless and exciting, and so they dreamt on the soft green land for a long time.

Eroth had been dreaming that she was walking home from a long and weary journey, with the soil hot and drooping leaves sending down shards of white light so that there was a kind of riot in the air, and she remembered something that she had never known, and it was that each leaf was a heartbreak - a real heartbreak, waiting for the cool dark of the ground. She thought that it was a sad thing, or maybe a happy thing, that no one would think of them again. And then she opened her eyes because she had found something round and cold lying next to her hand, and it was decidedly not a fallen heartbreak.

“Look, Thranduilion,” she sat up. “It’s a locket. I’d thought that no one travelled around here anymore.”

Legolas held out his palm. Instead the elleth placed her hand in his and tugged him from the grass. His world was still in a fog, and when he had dispelled sleep, he went with her to wash their faces and hair in the stream. Eroth dipped the metal chain into the water and that was when they first saw Goldberry, the river’s daughter, and wife to Tom Bombadil.

Her voice veered upwards as she mocked. “Maybe its owner fell horribly in love, and wandered all around carrying the longing with him, and begged the first craftsman he saw to paint it for him just as he remembered it.”

“That’s a saddening tale, Eroth.”

“I am certain I've heard of her before. She lives in a forest far away, and she has a bowl of water lilies at her feet.” With a tired little sigh she flung herself back down. “The trees have forgotten their tongue in that land.”

“Then someone must journey there and sing to them.”

“I'll hold you to your word, Legolas.”

Later they wandered hazy-eyed into the deep forest where they dwelt. Somewhere a web glistened but the sunlight was burning bright, making things forget, and a crow mourned a scatter of black feathers. Eroth drew fingers over her heavy hair, combing out its spidery red braids. Stopped to pick at a stalk of grass stuck to her bare feet.

“Help me with this - this song I can’t recall. It goes, ‘hey lily la, from whose brown hills -’ and then ‘lily lo, what silly frills’ -”

“From no-one’s hills she came.”

“That’s alike. But it ended so lovely, the first time I heard it I fell about laughing.”

For a while she sank into utter quiescence. A yellow square of sunlight, within which an insect flitted, swayed over a corner of her face. The other side was darkened by the shadows of the tall weeds which rasped and dipped with the river’s undulations.

Her lips blew out a wisp of scornful laughter. “I’m tired of this. These wistful games.”

“Just when I was afraid you’d gotten soft.”

“You know what I dreamt of? Heartbreaks. But they were just leaves - just rotting bits of leaf. They were objects to me. I felt so cynical.

“You think you’re above heartbreak, Eroth?” He turned over her hand, pretending to trace her palm. “Yet these lines speak of calamities.”

She drew her hand away. “Take it back."

“Nay.”

She bit her lip. “Charlatan.”

“Doomed soul.”

Uttering a sound of despair, she stalked away, grey slacks swishing. Her shadow on the long grass vanished into the deeper shade of hanging willows, with their mournful leaves and fallen yellow stalks. When Legolas reached her, pushing through the fluorescent heat, he noticed a damp, curled-up braid caught upon the back of her neck, just above the collar of her tunic.

“A second reading,” he said, laughing.

“You’ll take it back?”

“I’ll offer an exorcism, a love potion, a spiritual interpretation of your countenance. Whichever.”

She turned to him and tilted up her face, pale and made water-like with shadows. Her voice had an sarcastic lilt. “Tell me my eyes sing of amour.”

“Your eyes sing of amour,” he said innocently.

Legolas knew that Eroth wanted nothing to do with amour. She laughed at it, as she would laugh at new leaves on a birch or fireflies at dusk, thinking it something lovely but perishable, elusive, untouchable.

“Oh, you make me blush.” She was not blushing. Her mouth smirked. “But I must defer to the oracle.”

The summer light did strange things to her features. Her grey eyes were flecked with gold and, dragon-like, they slanted away.

***

“Legolas!” She shouted down at him. In the gloom Eroth could see the back of his head disappearing down the spiral steps.

Days had passed since last she saw him. She had been occupied. The sun was like an archer, bearing down upon the forest, so she had taken to sleeping at noon and waking in the noisy torchlit blueness of evening. Her father Balthoron had been pressing her training, determined to enforce in her an appetite for the hand-to-hand combat in which he excelled. She hated it, ay – but other times she understood. The headiness of being so near she could _sense_ her opponent – the sinuous tension in their muscles, their exhales of fear. She had only ever been in one real fight, and it was like becoming a shadow, a joining more than a breaking. Her hands curled, but she laughed and shook herself from the reverie.

It seemed that they both were in need of some questionable information if, on such a glorious day, Legolas too was descending toward the sunless nihilistic library in Greenwood’s depths. He must not have heard her. His steps did not stop and the lantern-light was disorientating. She was suddenly gripped by the fear that he had never been there at all.

“Legolas,” she said again, but her voice sounded quieter.

No waver in the purple darkness. But there was no longer the echo of footsteps. Then she smiled, because she knew he was coming toward her.

Moments later they met, almost colliding in the dark crevice of the staircase. The cloth of his dark shirt whispered as he placed a hand against her shoulder.

“Greetings, stranger,” said Legolas.

Eroth grasped his arm and pulled him onto her step. “What brings you here?”

“There’s rumour of some banned books. A shelf of them, hidden down there. I’m curious.”

“So you’ve heard it too?”

“Ay. Were it not so I would not willingly come someplace so dark and silent.”

“Not quite the scholar today, it seems.”

“Oh Eroth,” he teased, “truly _your_ learning is too much to behold.”

“Not so. Learning makes one a steeple-fingered snob. I’m not snobbish and am steeple-fingered only occasionally.”

“Ay, when catching salmon in the streams.”

“You know me too well, Thranduilion. I worry you may find out my darkest secrets.”

A gate clanged above them, making them both start. Legolas drew her lightly toward him.

“Come with me,” he said, digging into his pockets. “And I have brought plums.”

The library, when they reached it, was cool and deserted. Lanterns glowed somnolently, disintegrating into suspended light above the tall shelves of leather-bound volumes. A discarded travelling cloak lay aslant a pile of ragged blue notebooks. Stepping inside, Eroth could see archways upon archways ascending into the gloom, their carven stone roses hidden under the fury of wild-growing ivy.

“This place has forgotten sunlight,” murmured Legolas. His eyes looked black in the dimness.

In the third hall was a coiled stone staircase, its mouth opening onto a narrow overhanging ledge. The air smelled like incense. They climbed up and found that the shelves were of a different make, lined with golden borders shaped like the branches of apple trees, dripping with tiny, heart-shaped fruit.

“Folklore,” she said. “It seems that we have come upon the forbidden knowledge.”

From the corner of the shelf she took a scarlet manuscript and a dark velvet tome inset with coolly glinting leaves. The first book opened like petals in her hands – _Werifesteria,_ it read on the inside. Nothing about it seemed particularly outrageous. She turned the page and saw a sketch of a woman’s face. Her eyes were half-shadowed and sleepy, as if she were drowsing beside a cool fountain on a hot summer’s day, and her fingers lightly hovered upon parted lips. Nothing about this seemed outrageous either, but Eroth took a step back instinctively. There was something shimmeringly tensile about that face, something that seeped outward, as if the woman was speaking a word, and this word was ripe and sweet and unsettling. She slammed the book shut.

Legolas looked at her with an eyebrow quirked.

“I thought it smelled strange in here,” Eroth said. “But now I realise it simply smells of boredom.”

“ _Mellon nin._ ” He smiled and placed a map in her hands. “Cast your eyes there, beside ‘ _lands of Eriador’_.”

On the parchment was written in green ink: 

_Reeds by the shady pool, lilies on the water:_

_Old Tom Bombadil and the River-daughter!_

Eroth took out the plum he had given her and bit into it. “I suppose our fate cries out.” She turned the map sideways, “the Old Forest. How quaint.”

“It lies beyond the Misty Mountains.”

“My father knows the high pass well. He says it is cold even in the longest days of the summer, but that ‘tis the best place to look upon the stars.”

“Eroth, I feel I must go there. I know not why.”

He bent his head over the map, tracing over their path down to the Forest Road, Rhovanion, the folding ridges of the mountains. Abruptly her heart was like an animal in spring, stirring from slumber. She could see blue mist deepening rising peaks, and the great darkness of open sky. She said nothing, for the fruit in her mouth was sweet, sweet and unsettling too.

“You saw something in that book,” Legolas said quietly.

“T’was horrific indeed,” she replied, and looked at him unflinching. “A page of absurd poetry.”

***

Before the poison of Ungoliant spread, in the end of the Third Age, the elves of Greenwood resided amongst the trees in a network of flets and cabins. In the night the ghostly wink of pale lamps led wanderers astray, and in daytime there was song, faint and melancholic as the sounds of the leaves.

When Eroth came back to her room the locket of Goldberry was lying there on her pillow. She could not remember placing it there, but then a sensation came back faintly, of flicking open its cold bright lid just before she’d fallen into slumber. Inside it was nothing but a mirror. A stalk of lavender had fallen from the ceramic vase beside her bed, and swivelled slowly there in the breeze in surreal juxtaposition. She felt a sudden anger, the kind one feels when wakened too early, but it was so bizarre that she tried to cease feeling it.

Then she opened the shutters and saw Oraama reclining on the wooden flet outside her window, shielding her face from the sun with two large oak leaves. The elleth was in the habit of resting there uninvited, and so Eroth was unsurprised.

“My friend, I am tired,” Oraama said, turning her head ever so slightly in her direction. “Tired of lying here.”

Leaning against the window-ledge, Eroth gestured vaguely to a point in the distance. “What about lying there?”

“My friend, you wound me so soon.”

Drowsily the elleth pushed herself onto one elbow and studied Eroth. Her glance was catlike and incisive. “I see you do not intend to wound me. You’ve become troubled.”

“Hardly,” drawled Eroth. The idea of being dissected, however affectionately, was unappealing. She pushed herself over the ledge and leapt lightly onto the flet. “I’m untroubled as water at the bottom of a cave.”

“Water ripples all over when disturbed by a drop.”

Eroth settled down next to the other elleth, tilted her face up to the sun, and closed her eyes. The wind was fragrant with moringa, and she felt a kind of beauty touch her, soporific and lulling. “Your wisdom is in overabundance today. Speak on, then.”

“Your face is full of yearning.”

Her brow creased. “That’s irrelevant. I am always yearning. For night, for dawn; for heat, for coolness.”

When there was silence, she asked, “What is it about this yearning?”

Oraama’s half-lidded eyes seemed to smile, but her mouth didn’t. “I’m no sage.”

“You have the airs of one,” Eroth said in irritation.

“Yet I’m not.”

The elleth laid an oak leaf over her face, and sank back into a complacent tranquillity.

After a while, Eroth sighed out in frustration. The breeze had lisped into nothingness and in its place heaved the din of crickets. She opened her eyes and faced the red noon sun, which was a blank round face of fury, then said to no one in particular, “It is too hot.”

The now wilting leaf had fallen and lay twisted in Oraama’s black hair. “I’m in love.”

Eroth started up, an unnamed terror passing through her body.

“Say that again.”

“I’m in love,” came the murmur.

Her fingers trembled. For all her cynicism and invulnerability! _I’m in love. Love was something you were in; a carnivorous flower for example, a womb._ It felt like a lash of betrayal somehow, that her friend of all people had fallen prey. A wolf succumbing to a lamb. Eroth rose to her feet.

The elleth looked up at her with her smiling dark eyes, and her still unsmiling mouth.

“Who is it?”

Oraama said, “he knows not.”

“Who, _mellon nin_?”

“He is the gamekeeper’s son. He has quick hands and a quicksilver mind. His name is Iolas.”

She said the name like biting from hot toffee-apple, so quick and sweet and easy. This ignited Eroth’s anger.

“I am glad for you,” she said stiffly.

“ _Mellon_ ,” Oraama rose, “Do you intend to prohibit me from loving?”

The humour was gone from her voice. Finally Eroth understood that she had been given some delicate object to hold in her palm, and that she must try not to crush it. This thing was strange to her but it was precious and alive. This was another’s possession. Or another’s possessor, she could not tell. She laughed and said, “I’ve been a fool.” Laughed and touched the elleth’s dark hair, once, in a gesture of wonder.


	2. Their Reflections Are Emptiness

**Chapter 2 – Their Reflections Are Emptiness**

All light is sacred to the Eldar, but the wood-elves love best the light of the stars.

On the day of Mereth Nuin Giliath the paper lanterns were being strung. They permeated the treetops like sleeping white birds. It is was being said that never had the wind been calmer, nor the air sweeter. Trouble slumbered fleetingly. Foes sang with each other sleepy-eyed.

Some elflings were huddled in the crook of an ancient pine, their faces and hair stained green with its great unfathomable shadow. They were playing on a long Silvan wood-flute, its clear melancholy sound wobbling under their ministrations. Eroth listened to this from her window, curling and uncurling her fingers idly around the little rivulets of yellow ivy which ran down the sill.

A voice behind her spoke, “finally the Feast of Starlight.”

“Oraama, you must learn to knock.”

“What’s the use?” the elleth came to stand near her at the window. “I am already here.”

Eroth caught a strand of black hair between her fingers. “You are half ready.”

On the night of the Feast, all elves must shroud themselves in black so that the light of the stars could be undisturbed. It was time to extinguish herself. Eroth turned and unhooked a dark silk cloak from the wall. The hood would fall over her face like the lip of an orchid. She was glad; she liked the obscurity of it, the fluidity of self it gifted her.

“Not so soon,” Oraama murmured behind her. “The evening is coming. You require a dress.”

Nevertheless Eroth was draping the cloak over her shoulders in front of the mirror. She only said absently, “’tis in here somewhere.”

The elleth found the outline of a dark slip from the recesses of the wardrobe and lifted it into the air. The sunlight fell upon it, and Oraama breathed out with delight. “Eroth, it is lovely.” She held the material up, creating little ripples down the loose aqueous satin. It was black as a lake of Khazad-dum. 

“When you wear that it will turn you into a silhouette.”

She went and drew close the wooden shutters. Golden evening light shivered and fell way, emptying the room of its vertices, leaving behind a peculiar cave-like dimness. Eroth had shrugged off her tunic and now she took the dress, sliding it brusquely over her head. In the mirror her indistinct reflection seemed to smile. “It is like slipping on a shadow.”

With the rasp of a match Oraama fed a flame to the candle. In her hand had also appeared a small compact containing an ebony pigment. She sank down onto the bed, drawing close a stool with an outstretched ankle, and beckoned Eroth to sit whilst she smeared the shimmering powder in two swift touches of the thumb upon her eyelids. Reaching up, Eroth did the same for her, coiling the mark upward. The ritual was complete.

***

The godless pilgrimage was beginning. Black-robed the Elvenking emerged from his Halls and crossed the walkway, tall and lonely and silent as a tree of the cliffside, to consummate the darkness with the fall of his hand. With this signal all lamps were put out, and Thranduil descended from his steed to walk as one amongst his people.

The first stars had already come. The night sky unveiled itself, as the sea seeps away from a drowned city. They walked on into the forest. All wore the dark hoods which were to join wonder with oblivion. There came neither speech nor singing. Like a strange frost in midsummer was the grey light of Mereth Nuin Giliath.

Eroth looked up suddenly to see what felt like the eternal expanse of night bearing down upon her. She thumbed at the corner of fear. Perhaps that was what came after oblivion. Or perhaps it was because she had not yet reached it. She dropped her eyes.

Finally the path opened up and they came upon the lake of Greenwood with its dark still waters like an abyss plunging deep into the land. When the clear light shone down it appeared to be full of floating stars. They came to stand around it, and their reflections showed as snatches of emptiness in the dark circle silver-seamed. Into the labyrinthine silence came a voice like the drop of a stone to water, saying high and clear, _ollo vae_. Another said, _ollo vae, Thranduil._ This was a parting. _Abarad_ , the Elvenking called in return, and laughed. The elves turned from the lake and drifted back into the trees, leaving him to watch alone over the amaranthine night.

Each year at midnight the King remained while the rest went back, to cherry wine and dancing and the relighting of lamps, with the long tables heaped with grapes and rye and the glistening purple cross-sections of plums. Eroth suspected that it was prevent any undignified behaviour from being drawn out of him in the small hours of the night, wherein the wine possessed everyone’s souls, and for this being recorded into Greenwood’s lore forevermore. But, at risk of desecrating the vigil, she twisted her face away and stifled a smile.

The last few remaining walked forward and touched hands with the Elvenking. _Iston i nîf gîn_ , he was saying to them, _I know your face,_ restoring them from anonymity _. Iston i nîf lîn_ , they said back, drawing away their hoods, _Thranduil my King._

The time for wonder and whatever else that came with it was now over. They had left the lake. Someone, seizing his courage, sang out in a clear deep voice. Suddenly wood-flutes were produced, mysterious harps retrieved from the undergrowth, and the night they stole from the distant silver sky and dispersed laughingly from hand to hand. Like a great beast shaking itself from sleep the real celebrations had come alive.

She was carried along like a leaf on the river. A mist was stealing over the stars. She could sense the tinge of wine-sweetness in the breeze, and the crowd closing in, and Legolas, grasping her wrist in the dark, “ _tolo ar nin_.”

***

Bursting unexpectedly into flaming lamplight, they stared at each other as if they had not known the other was there. Legolas threw back his hood. The wind had tangled his pale hair about his shoulders, and he was clothed in a dark high-collared shirt. He said something indistinguishable in the swelling noise. Realising that Eroth could not hear, he draped an arm around her shoulders and said in her ear, “you look lovely tonight, _mellon_.”

Someone had caught hold of him, jesting “’tis too hot not to be dancing” and Legolas, laughing, loosened his collar, letting the other elves draw him backwards into their midst. Quickly he pressed a cold flask into her hands.

“You realise that there are godforsaken barrels of this liquid around?” she yelled after him.

“I must dance,” he cried merrily, disappearing into the bodies, “I am sorry, I must dance.”

Eroth twisted open the flask and took a breath. It smelled sharp and mint-bitter. Not wine; antidote.

The first hints of sunlight were flickering upon the sky when she decided to make use of it. Her feet hurt from dancing. Beneath a burned-out paper lantern an ellon was feeding Oraama small green grapes. The sleeves of her black dress had slipped down to her arms, exposing pale sharp shoulder blades. She looked around and winked almost imperceptibly at Eroth as she opened her mouth to nip at the fruit dangling from Iolas’ fingers. The elleth watched them, frozen, unsure of whether to be enthralled or repulsed. She settled for a mingling of both, and became as a consequence faintly lightheaded. Though of course that might as well be attributed to the Southern wine, and it was at this point that she brought out Legolas’ flask and took two long draughts, letting the liquid cool her mouth. She took a deep breath, as if emerging from an underland. She would wait until the first sliver of a red sun on the edge of the treetops. Then she would go.

A forest fog cast the ravages of the night into a cold, absurd haze. Harps were left upright like tall uncanny flowers. She moved curiously through her kin, through lovers and enemies scorning each other and the sleeping untroubled faces of the intoxicated. Elves did not collapse; they drooped like wilted lilies. One such lily had made the fascinating decision of meeting her pretty downfall in the shape of the princeling of the realm.

“She will not stir,” said princeling told her, a little sourly. “She was speaking of her home, then of my eyes, but this subject being rather easily exhaustible she is now asleep.”

At this point the golden head teetered a little, blonde curls dripping across his neck, and he warily lifted a hand to the side of the elleth’s cheek, steadying her. Eroth was unsympathetic.

“While you’re at it, why don’t you run your fingers through those long, silky locks?”

“I am _at_ nothing, Eroth, except maybe the end of my tether.” He looked down at the sleeping elleth, “if I move, I’d waken her.”

“Then waken her.”

“I cannot, she smiles from her dream.”

“I don’t know,” she pretended to puzzle over her braid, “it appears then that you have plenty of tether to spare.”

She looked up, anticipating a satisfactory glower of irritation, but Legolas was smiling rather sweetly.

“Well?” she demanded.

“Naught,” he murmured, “but that I’ve resigned myself to my fate.”

With that, he dropped his gaze and lapsed into thoughtful silence.

Hands tugged at her, inviting her into the sad struggling staccato of a flute song, but she shrugged them off. She was no longer merry.

**Translations**

_Mereth Nuin Giliath –_ Feast of Starlight

_Ollo vae –_ sweet dreams

_Abarad –_ until tomorrow

_Iston i nîf gîn –_ I know your face [familiar]

_Iston i nîf lîn –_ I know your face [reverential]

_Tolo ar nin –_ come with me

**Songs**

_Feast of Starlight_ by _Howard Shore_

_Wilder Mind_ by _Mumford & Sons_


	3. Mint Is Picked

**Chapter 3 – Mint Is Picked**

As the dusk was falling over the blue trees, Eroth said to Feredir, “I’m leaving in the morrow.”

In her hand lay the cold and secretive circle of the mortal’s locket. The dark-haired ellon pulled it from her resisting fingers and inspected it incredulously. The River-daughter’s laughing eyes glinted briefly at them as he turned it over. “All this for such a simple thing?”

“But _mellon_ , it is not a simple thing at all. It is a mystery.”

His eyebrows tugged upwards. “A veritable mystery! I couldn’t have foreseen - _Eroth Dree_ the romantic.”

“Tell me, is it straining to be this ironical all the time?”

He smiled, “oh, take your romantic’s judgement away from me.”

“Just bid me farewell, Feredir. And do it sincerely.”

“Have you bid Legolas farewell?”

“He is coming with me.”

“Ah,” the ellon tapped long fingers on his knees, and leaned back with an air of having solved a riddle. This was all in accordance with his usual inscrutable manner, so Eroth did not question it.

“We found the locket together, here in this meadow. It must have been carried into Greenwood on the stream.”

“But there is no stream.”

“Nonsense, we washed our faces in it.” She cast about her vaguely, including in the flick of her fingers the dark-rimmed trees, the gentle blue grass, and a lone lightning bug circling round a low-hanging bough. But it had not included the aforementioned stream. As if expecting to have called it into existence, she listened for the tinkle of running water, but there came none. She raised her eyebrows. “It proves elusive.”

“Would you call me paranoid if I suggested that this makes me uneasy?”

“Streams dry up. See,” at this lifting her hand up, “I can feel the heat passing through my fingers, and yet the moon is near risen. It is too hot here.”

Feredir pressed against the lid of the locket; it opened softly, its inset mirror causing a smudge of light to leap onto his skin. Frowning he said, “I am expecting to be enthralled, yet all I see is a lady’s head and a reasonably well-polished mirror.”

But Eroth continued on dreamily, “In the west it is better. The House of Elrond will be wind-ruffled and in shadow this time of year. Do you know what they drink to ward off the heat, Feredir?”

“Nay, I know not.”

“They drink clear wine and crushed berries, all red and lush and cool in bamboo cups. Because bamboo keeps the first taste of ice on the tongue.”

With the casual elegance of a magician entering the stage, a white sliver of moon rose. “Go then,” Feredir said, his glance following the moonlight, “do not talk to strangers, and all the rest of that.” He smiled quiescently. “You are right, it is too hot here to think, too hot to feel.”

***

When Eroth entered the study, her father was bent over a table of sprawling scrolls, his brows furiously knotted. A silver pitcher of wine lay beside his hand and the single candle was burning low. Outside amongst the trees the crickets roared.

“Eroth, _lellig_ ,” he said, looking up briefly. “I have been thinking over your journey – take not the high pass.”

“Why is that?”

“’Tis my great fortune that this is a time of peace. The woodmen speak true that wood-elves are less wise and more dangerous. Let them listen to the rot of our esteemed council, and they shall smile to themselves in the validation of their words –”

“Why not the high pass, father?”

“Listen to the crickets. Listen to the heaviness of the wind through the leaves. It will be storm season soon.”

Eroth closed her eyes and found that there was indeed a stagnancy about the air, a pause, like the land had breathed inward.

“Find the secret path through the grey gorge, west of Lorien. It is time you returned.”

But it was not yet time. Lorien was a place of grief.

She said, “Pelior is there, learning the healing art. I shall write to him so that he expects me.”

Her brother was certainly not in the Golden Wood. And his hands had likely not been laid upon herbs or basins since the first warming of the air in summer. Perhaps he was circling Enedwaith, looking for strange tales, or playing drinking-games with exiles in the firelight of long-forgotten inns. She no longer knew. Pelior wandered the lands with a frantic curiosity that seemed almost like a will to escape.

“Good,” Balthoron rose. “You have come of age, Eroth. All things call to you.”

For a moment Eroth felt again distinctly the storm-omens of the air. It held a kind of stagnancy that was drunken. Intoxicated and intoxicating, then. But it would be fine – she knew many that had crossed the Misty Mountains without trouble. She moved forward and clasped her father’s arm. “Farewell, _ada_. Until autumn.”

“Farewell. I would catch you a creature of the wind, for peace and swift feet, but the dragonflies have buried themselves into the reeds by now.” He stooped back over the desk, ready to return to his work, but then he lifted his head. “Keep the princeling unscathed. The Elvenking is difficult to answer to.”

***

The next morning Eroth was awoken by the yellow sunlight, warm upon her eyelids. A smile curled on her lips. The swallows were dipping and rising with the early wind, she knew, because she heard their high clear yearning call. Then she started toward the window. Ay, there the sun blazed, smug and round above the swaying trees. She was late.

Brusquely she braided her hair and pulled on an open-collared tunic. Ran her face under cold water by the basin. By the time she had retrieved the required objects from the corners of her room – waybread, a length of silver rope, her twin curved daggers and, as an afterthought, a sprig of grapes – her plait was unravelling and she could hear Legolas’ lazy voice out there, floating into a second voice, the possessor of whom he was evidently conversing with.

When she came down from the flet, dropping from the ivy vine to the ground with a flourish, she saw that he was testing the tension of a bowstring. It was not his bow. In a fluid motion he drew the string back and the weapon thrummed from his touch. Dipping his head down, running a finger lightly over the pale taut curve of wood, he said softly, “you shall find much use from it.” He told this to the elleth by his side, and then he looked up with a smile.

“ _Na vedui,_ Eroth.”

Handing the bow absently back to its fair owner, he came toward her. “I did not sleep well last night.”

Eroth tilted her head up, “why is that?”

“I was thinking of the far plains. _Mellon nin,_ are you ready?”

“I am ready.” Her heart was beating fast.

Legolas smiled, narrowed his eyes against the sun, and put a grape in his mouth. The purple sprig she had been dangling from her fingers was now incomplete. Eroth dropped the rest into her pack, shaded her eyes, yawned into the pure bright air and decided she was satisfied with the way her fate had been arranged so far.

They went to the stables and led out their horses. Then they came out onto the final walkway, its immense stone arch, its carvings of well-wishing, where suddenly from head to toe she felt this, _yes, she was ready_ , and cast her eyes toward the open path.

***

By noon they had went beyond the realm of their kin. Their horses were restless and so they rode swiftly, passing like a wind through the trees. Mist rose and fell. Sometimes the forest was thick with hanging ivy, strong with old tall pines, and sometimes it burst open into meadows criss-crossed with slanting dark tree shadows, where they circled each other as if in a duel, then broke apart back into the bristling shade.

When the land caved into a ravine before them, they hushed their horses and dismounted. The forest was gentle and moss-lined. They had entered into a shadowy, quiet realm away from sunlight. The broken form of a leaning alder dropped its silvery pale leaves into the low ground. Legolas laid his finger upon a young sworl of leaf, and it whispered from the branch, a yellow line of sunlight shining through the empty space where it had broken off. “We are near water.”

Eroth was chewing a mint leaf she had picked by the path. “And water we must find. I am near wilting.”

They left the horses at the edge of the ravine and descended down to the bottom, walking alongside the rippling dips in the land. The alders thickened, their leaves like silver pellets singing above them.

“I just recalled something,” Eroth said. “The elleth we saw this morning – she was that sleeping poet from Mereth Nuin Giliath.”

“So she is. Aeothen is her name.”

The elleth pushed low-hanging ivy from her face. She seemed to be trying to shape words in her head. Then, with a little resigned sigh, she said.

“I like her. She is fair even when she is in slumber.”

There was a pause again.

“She flirts with you. Can you not tell?”

Legolas pondered this. “It matters not. Even foes seem like lovers on the night of starlight.”

“Oh, sod off,” she said abruptly. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, everyone thinks so.”

“Do you think so?” He queried.

Eroth’s slender eyebrows quirked up, but to his bewilderment, this changed little by little, until something soft and soporific and open rippled across her face. Her gaze had lowered.

“My lord,” she began in an entirely different voice, “I hesitate to say.”

Legolas rolled his eyes.

Eroth – this Eroth – pouted sweetly. “Do you treat me with disdain?”

The mossy earth trailed into a slew of narrow stone steps. At the very top was a wide tree, split in half at the base. They tried to pass together but it was narrow and they stopped, leaning against each bough, brought near unexpectedly. It was then that she flicked a glance up, and he saw that her eyes remained sharp as sword-grass, and sly. “But oh, I adore you.”

“You _really_ do not,” sighed Legolas.

“I have adored you since tralalali-long ago, when last I saw your golden hair under the sun. Your piercing blue eyes could pierce through lumpy custard –”

“What is custard?” he asked sullenly.

“My poor, suff’ring heart,” she sighed, “the lady professes her love and he ruminates about custard!”

Unable to break her façade he stopped, still leaning against the slanted oak, looking vexed.

Eroth blew him a kiss and walked happily on.

**Translations**

_Lellig –_ my daughter

_Ada –_ father

La vedui – at last

**Songs**

_Lucky_ by _Aurora_

_Riptide_ by _Vance Joy_


	4. Greenwood Creaks Open

**Chapter 4 – Greenwood Creaks Open**

In the mornings the air is clear, sharp, full of whirring rasping leaves, but at noon a damp smell comes into it, the sunlight thickens and grows heavy, the leaves become still and shimmer.

The elf-path ran on. When their horses tired they dismounted and combed the brambles for early sour blackberries, or steeped their feet in the streams, or climbed up to the treetops to feel the west-flowing wind on their skin. Once they were nearly sent toppling by a violent uproar of blue butterflies, powdery, turning and slicing the air, and they followed the jerky arcs of their wings far away over the forest, where the faint sun-blurred lines of the Misty Mountains loomed at what seemed to be the edge of the earth. 

The elf-path was uncanny at night. They tried everything to dispel the darkness. But when they lit a fire they were watched by eyes that floated, blinking into existence, multiplying, bulbous and yellow and hungry. Away from the Elvenking’s Halls the trees knew them still, but had grown brooding, their ancient lives bent under the relentless black eternities of night, until they learned to commune with it, to conjure it again in their great silent shades. For days they did not see starlight. It sickened them body and soul. And ceaselessly night came, filling them with dread, where in the nihilism of utter dark they lay side by side, and Legolas sung softly the snatches of old elvish tunes, in vain trying to mould the long hours into things of light and shadow. The forest, their old friend, and the arches of branches they had looked up at since elflings, had never seemed so strange. But, as always, the morning came before despair. 

One evening, while they were walking alongside their horses, a lone grey prairie moth came and twinkled near Eroth’s finger. She turned her palm upwards, but it had lifted away into the trees. “We are nearing the end,” she said in wonder. _The end._ As if the end of the treeline would be the end of the path, the end of herself, the precise point of a calmly awaiting doom. For the elleth had not seen open land in near a thousand years.

Erewhile the long shadow of the last gate was thrown upon the ground before their feet. The forest creaked outward, the spell of it, its dream-like shades, its interminable illusion breaking apart finally and receding smokily behind them. The gate itself was bordered with two leafless white trees, tall and beautiful under a rising moon. _I have been blind,_ Eroth thought to herself as together they stood beneath the edge of the woodland. _I have loved the trees so much it has blinded me to these things –_

The moon. The whispering stars. The grass saturating the land’s end like fog. Suddenly something made her look back. The cold white face of a statue stared beyond her with lidded eyes, cast over by a hood of careful marble. Eroth saw that whilst the blue tree-shadows lay in the hollow of her neck, her circlet held pools of starlight. It was made by the first Wood-elves east of the Wilderland, back when her people used to live at the border of the forest and ride out into the plains to hunt in the night. They walked onwards into the grassland. She turned back no more.

***

The next morning, she woke to the smell of cooking walnuts.

The rising sun rippled softly, bearing with it a sky that veered bright and vast overhead. Gossamer blew amongst the long grass, wet with dew. The elleth rose and walked thoughtfully alongside the stream for a while, listening to its tinkling like hidden laughter, combing out her hair and twisting two little braids behind her ears in the manner of her kin. She lifted her face to the white morning light. It was so lovely. The red plains rolled back under the wind, as if the land was breathing slowly and ponderously, and from the grass flitted a whirring sparrow with an insect in its beak, upwards to an old blue tree. Legolas was drowsing beside the fire, his walnuts charring. There were hollows under his eyes. His braids had long come undone, and so his pale hair was tousled. Eroth untied the rag with its walnuts from above the fire and twisted it into a bundle. Then she turned and shook him.

He murmured in protest and slept on resolutely.

"I could be an Orc," she declared, insulted.

His lips moved faintly. There were streaks of blonde hair across his face which stirred upon his breath. "You are not an oak."

"An Orc," Eroth supplied helpfully, but she knew he was no longer hearing her. This morn, they had all the time in the world. She knelt and washed her face in the cold white stream. Water dripping from the ends of her hair, she took out a walnut and cracked it open with the blunt end of her sheathed dagger. It tasted sweet and burnt. She had another.

Slowly she became aware of the sound of a waterfall.

For it was definitely a waterfall. She leapt up in delight. The stream strayed from the path in a wide loping curve round the back of some jutting boulders, with moss growing around them and a low, echoing noise coming from within. They were so large against the early sky that they could be mistaken for crags.

“Legolas!” she cried. “ _A lelyalmë_ , Legolas.” (let us go)

***

With her hair like that she looked like a young willow, fresh-drenched from the waterfall, green water-shadows glistening over her upturned face. Legolas, standing waist-deep in the shattered water of the rockpool, looked at the elleth in surprise. Eroth was rinsing out her braid with her fingers, tunic sleeves rolled back and brown slacks hitched up at the knees. She tugged on a wet tangled lock and laughed.

“I'm always clumsy after I've been graceful.”

They had been hurling themselves against the waterfall encircled within the boulders, gripped by a curiosity and perverse urge to learn how the world looked from the other side. In that secret shade they had stayed, where the light was a pale creature prowling its walls, and they could barely hear each other speak over the giant’s roar of water folding into water.

“It is late.” Light had blossomed in yellow flowers across the cracked boulders, and the shadows were gathering in the pool.

“Late for what?” She tilted her head, and he caught a quirk of the lips.

“Nothing.”

In a swift motion and swirl of the water he lunged forward and, catching her arm, dragged her down from her perch. Eroth’s braid dipped into currents and became once more undone. She laughed, reached for him, shook hair from her eyes the colour of a flame tree’s spread.

“You're making me late for nothing, Thranduilion. I detest you.”

“Nothing is important to you, then?”

“Ay,” her eyes sparked. “Nothing’s important to me.”

Suddenly the sun succumbed to a white sky, and the gloom rose whispering all around. The wind blew the blue shade down, down from the tips of boulders and into final slumber beside them. All at once Legolas was aware of the deep cool of the water, its sinuous tendrils of water plants, and its mournful drifting.

There was still a note of sunlight on Eroth’s cheek, like a fallen petal, a strange remnant of the former world. Without intending to he touched the illuminated skin, scattering the yellow, and he saw her frown slightly.

“What is the matter?”

Eroth turned aside, and he watched a droplet from the waterfall land on the tip of her nose, which she dispelled absently with a fingertip. “Your hands are cold.”

“Are _you_ cold?” He asked, moving closer.

“Ay - nay, not at all.”

She still seemed thoughtful, so Legolas studied the beads of water hovering upon her pale skin. He decided to skim the back of his hand up her neck, smoothing away the water there, and something inexplicable happened. The elleth gave a small intake of breath, and caught his fingers.

“Legolas, what are you doing?”

In that instance the light flooded back upon them, and they were once again steeped in a pool of molten gold in a grassland that was alive, alive, alive. Legolas narrowed his eyes against the sudden sun, so red and ripe and gloomy against the vast sky that it seemed to have wandered there accidentally. He could make out the mountains in the distance, their white peaks, their cruel falls and gentle ridges.

There was not a storm cloud in sight.

**Songs**

_Melancholia_ by _Emilie Nicolas_


	5. Stone Giants Stir

**Chapter 5 – Stone Giants Stir**

By nightfall of the next day they had summitted the first ridge, and they left their horses behind. The air grew thinner and less forgiving. Smoky clouds of insects which chased the last lights of the sun vanished. The more they climbed, reaching upward, the more the darkening ancient sky billowed and withdrew into greater heights. Eroth could still hear the sound of the waterfall in her mind, and though the dark and unutterable distances of the mountains she exalted in, a part of her longed for the fresh green rockpool, for its amnesiac seclusion.

When the starlight came it was to fail and falter against the enigmatic pillars of great stones which rose up before them, with monstrous suddenness, like a sleepwalking man rises in his slumber. The elleth walked through their impenetrable black shadows with the thudding impression that they had been arranged in a sacrificial circle for an awaiting ritual. Legolas passed through their outer edge, gliding behind the pillars in his green hood, so that she almost called his name out of an absurd suspicion that he had been replaced by a creature of the night. As another of the stone shadows solidified against her hair and face, she pressed a hand to the handle of her dagger.

Ahead of her, Legolas had stopped still. Her foreboding rose. He turned to her, and his eyes were troubled beneath the rim of his hood. “It is gone.”

By which he meant the path.

Eroth joined him, her fingers curling tightly around her sheathed dagger. It was an old habit; an attempt to find comfort from the coolness of steel, the deadliness of a blade. The blue grass of twilight and a lonely orange mountain flower tapered suddenly into blank unyielding darkness. They had neared a precipice.

“It cannot be,” she murmured.

Legolas flashed a glance at her. But the elleth had already circled to the edge, walking alongside it, crouching down to lean over the drop.

In the winds of time the mountain had been cleaved in half and shifted out of place. What was left of their path lay severed below them, a thin ledge clinging to the side of another cliff, separated by the vertical slash of a chasm. The cold white light of its stone shone up to them, fading in and out of cloud shadow. 

Eroth secured her length of rope to the edge of the precipice. Legolas looped slender fingers through the knot, testing its tension. Satisfied, he wrapped his hands around and swung gracefully off the side of the mountain. Erewhile his voice drifted upwards, calling her to join him.

When they had both descended down to the ledge, Eroth drew back her rope with a flick of her wrist. It slipped jauntily back into her hands like a coiled grey snake. At this, however, the rope and half of the cliff’s face flashed white-blue.

Then there was silence, and darkness again. Eroth felt nauseous. They waited – thunder answered. There was nowhere to go.

“Make haste!” she cried.

“We must find shelter!” said Legolas.

“Shelter?” she swung upon him incredulously, “why, I should have taken my parasol!”

He looked despairing. “Shelter, ay Eroth, when the rocks begin to fall.”

The storm was upon them. They were blinded by rain.

“How unfortunate,” the elleth was mocking, “there’s not an architecturally adequate structure _anywhere_ on this _bare_ cliffside.”

“To speak true, I would rather yet draw breath by the morrow than –”

“Or, to my dismay, four bluebirds haven’t come twittering and bearing a piece of nice –”

“Careful!” Legolas cried, and dragged her toward him.

Nothing happened. Nothing fell; no boulder crashed. _The damned elf._ Legolas laughed low in her ear. His hands rested on her back still. She twisted, pushing him back by the shoulder. _Trapped on the high pass in a rainstorm and he could still summon mirth._ The ellon lifted a hand, palm open, in a peace-making gesture.

Lightning came like a scar against the paleness. The mountains roared. Legolas studied the distance; she stalked deliberately away. In a tortuous kind of advance they went onwards around the midsection of the curved cliff. The rockface was growing slick with rain. 

When finally, solace appeared in the silhouette of a strange pine, motionless in the storm, Legolas said in mock solemnness, “would you deem that architecturally adequate?”

Instead of laughing, Eroth surprised herself by saying, “do not concern yourself with me.”

Neither of them knew when their anger had ceased to be a performance. The storm had seeped through them it seemed, right down to the bone.

They searched at each other’s faces, but the lash of lightning had faded and their features were awash in darkness. Eroth dragged her hood down, feeling as the rain struck her skin that she must be in a fever. Silently they hastened toward the tree, which writhed outward from a crevice in the cliffside. It was majestical in the wind but very brittle, contracted over an abyss between mountains. A circle of stone jutted under it. Upon this they stood and shivered, and a great tremor passed through it, and the very mountains seemed to jolt out of shape, vertebrae by vertebrae, so that Legolas cried out, “so the myth is true!”

The stone giants were stirring. Never before had they seen the earth awaken but now it did, shaking itself from the nightmarish slumber of long years. _The war would be waged._ The elleth waited for fear but in its place came a fierce wonder. It was like her body had been shaken open. Everything roiled in wrath and mischief.

The path by which they had come split open. Easily, violently. A ringing entered their ears.

Legolas searched the darkness behind with his gaze. “Our path back to Lorien is shut.”

“We were never going to turn back."

Her wonder had concentrated into a single, white, burning point. Something boiled in her chest.

“Why do you fear it thus?"

“I do not fear Lorien. I hate it.”

“You lie, Eroth. You would rather face death than the past.”

By the rain, by the grotesque mountains, the frisson of their words was distorted and made other. Under a white sky which lashed at itself, they were compelled toward a flame-like ferocity, as if they could reach for no other end. 

Recklessly, she said in a cold voice, “ _mara mesta_ Thranduilion.”

“What do you mean?”

There was no yield in his tone. His eyes were hard.

“After this we part. You return to your forest, and your dark nights, and your great _venerable_ Elvenking. I shall journey on.”

The sky whitened, and in the cold unbearable light his face was like carven stone. She had insulted his home, his father, his King. Had pretended that she had no love for Greenwood. But how could she not? How could she not? A wild creature, a moth, a clawed thing, was beating around inside her head. She stepped backward.

The rock crumbled beneath her feet.

After vertigo, she knew that she was still alive. Centuries of training made her instincts quick and strong. She had reached for the hanging pine. She now flung herself upon it. Crouched, swaying, her body was taut as a drawn bow. Slowly, it came to her –

Legolas was climbing the tree, holding out his hand, and –

It came to her that this would have been a death away from sunlight, away from the sounds of the leaves and streams, into the deep which, dreaming in childhood, she used to wake from weeping.

Legolas caught her hand. He pulled her tight toward him, firmly, harshly. She screamed at him, not knowing what she had said, and he was cursing too. They watched each other with faces that were numb masks of fury. Descending to the ledge, clutching at rain-slick branches and the jagged rock, the absurdity of what they were engaged in - this spiteful, tender dance of life and death – was lost on them. Their hold was slipping. The rain drenched them. She cupped Legolas’ cold cheek. He tucked back the wet tangles of hair fallen across her eyes. They were still locked in argument, in a wrath born of fear, but their motions were less like an endless wrestling and had become calmer. Gently, in the midst of all violence, the moon slipped from behind a cloud.

 _What was this?_ Eroth thought, startlingly, and she breathed out into the foreign silence, let it hover in the air. _What was it that happened?_

For the giants had slept. The mountains returned to death resignedly, creakingly. The sky rippled open into shards of tender bluish moonlight. They stood together, slowing their erratic breathing. Eroth could not remember why she had been troubled. She searched herself for the blank hot feeling which the rain had drawn out, but it was gone. Her body was still tense, waiting for any disturbance in the vast bright stillness. After a while she spoke.

"Are you hurt?"

"Nay. Are you?"

The elleth shook her head. There was a pause. They were as unsure of each other as they were of themselves. Then Legolas lowered his eyes, and she saw that he was laughing softly, and he held out in his free hand a book.

In their struggle against the storm she had been leaning against him, her arms about his neck. Now she drew back to get a better glimpse, raising her hand to trace the tattered edge of the cover. “The _ann-thennath_ of Beren and Luthien.”

“I was waiting for a night of moonlight to read it. It is now upon us.”

What of the rage of stone? _To the shadows with it. That was not the way of the wood-elves._

“Luck is with you. You did not lose it to that inconvenient drizzle.”

“Nay, I kept it here –” he indicated the folds of his tunic. “My father was fond of reading it aloud when I was young.”

He flicked open the cover to reveal the emblem of a black-feathered nightingale. _Tinuviel. Tinuviel with a Silmaril for her bride-price._ It was a long tale for which the end is not known. The book was yet incomplete; its last pages were blank. Eroth laughed aloud. “What do you wait for? Sing it for me.”

“Unhand me _mellon nin_ , so I can get away from this wretched cliff-face.”

“Here, I have done so.” Her fingers flitted from his neck. He loosened his hold on her waist. “Dare this newfound silence with a tale.”

After that they sang with each other, as only elves can sing, quite composedly, forgetting the tempest-swept mountains and the broken pine. As this occupied them, up rose the northern wind again, so they raised their clear voices, contending with it. The lash of the pine had left a cut above Eroth’s brow. She did not heed it – there was no sting.

_Again she fled, but swift he came._

_Tinuviel! Tinuviel!_

_He called her by her elvish name;_

_And there she halted listening._

_One moment stood she, and a spell_

_His voice laid on her: Beren came,_

_And doom fell on Tinuviel_

_That in his arms lay glistening._

_As Beren looked into her eyes_

_Within the shadows of her hair,_

_The trembling starlight of the skies_

_He saw there mirrored shimmering._

_Tinuviel the elven-fair,_

_Immortal maiden elven-wise,_

_About him cast her shadowy hair_

_And arms like silver glimmering._

Legolas turned over the last page:

_Long was the way that fate them bore,_

_Over stony mountains cold and grey,_

_Through halls of iron and darkling door,_

_And woods of nightshade marrowless._

_The Sundering Seas between them lay,_

_And yet at last they meet once more,_

_And long ago they passed away_

_In the forest singing sorrowless._

He stopped and there was a pause. The wind was loud now.

It all came back to her – the vastness of the mountains, how dark was the deep into which she had looked. She thought of the nights she had lain with open eyes after the nightmares of her childhood. In her dreams it had been the same – the very bottom was not unreachable but close, inviting her in, sweetly beckoning. The old pine lifted up its branches in the wind. Legolas raised his head to watch it. His face was unreadable and coldly lit but not as it had been in the storm. Drawing away the book, Eroth kissed the skin over his knuckles. “ _Mellon nin_.”

**Songs**

_Fail We May Sail We Must_ by _Unloved_

 _Thistle & Weeds_ by _Mumford & Sons_


	6. Daylilies for Our Guests

**Chapter 6 – Daylilies for Our Guests**

Sometime in the night, scrambling up a slope, the path flattened mercifully into a gentle grassy mountaintop. Their arduous climb had ceased. Descent now began. They could sometimes glimpse the west plains, smoky and silver, clinging to the uppermost corner of the distance.

“Breakfast,” declared Eroth, when the sun rose. They had not eaten in two days.

A fire was made promptly upon a boulder which jutted over thin air; days in the mountains had cured their fear of great heights. As the flames crackled and the water boiled, they sat together and dangled their feet over the edge. The yellow sunlight kissed their skin. She scattered the last of her tea-leaves into the water. Legolas poured it into their flasks. Its bitter fragrance climbed into the air in little puffs of steam. They stamped out the flame, smiled down for the last time at the lands below, and slipped back down the boulder onto lush mountain grass. As they shared their pieces of waybread, the sky brightened and winked down at them in leaping shafts of young light.

Yawning extravagantly, Eroth’s contentment was near catlike. She said in her most dramatic cadence, which she reserved for joyous occasions, “I am soothed, Thranduilion. Oh, my wary spirit is _soothed_.”

As she stretched, the joints in her shoulders crackled. She made to stand, but Legolas said, “stay still awhile. I’ll help you ease the tension.”

“Try your hand. But be not gentle, I’m tough as a cypress.”

Legolas knelt down behind her and swept her hair to the side. His touch was sure; it had been common practice amongst archers, after bending bows for long hours, to do so for each other. Eroth closed her eyes as he ran his thumbs down her neck to the space between her shoulderblades. She felt the warmth of his palm flat against her spine, moving in slow circles, reaching an ache she never knew she had. “You are skilled,” she said in surprise.

“ _Mellon,_ you must relax.” His motions ceased. “You are still resisting.”

“I cannot help it. Usually when I allow someone so close they are an opponent.”

His touch now migrated to the juncture between her shoulders and her neck. The pressure there was light at first, brusque, until it decidedly _wasn’t_.

“ _Ai!”_ Eroth protested.

“I thought you warned me against being gentle.”

“It hurts,” she said.

“That is good.” Legolas sounded bewildered. “After a while this knot will loosen.”

The pressure resumed. The elleth smiled slyly to herself.

When Legolas turned over his palm she touched his fingers fleetingly as a warning, before grabbing hold of his hand; summoning strength, she twisted over so that he was forced to abide with the motion, and using this she pressed his arm to the ground, bringing his shoulders down also. His back touched the grass and he said, in mock betrayal, “so I was an opponent after all.”

With that the elf wrested himself free, fingertips grazing her arm, and caught her hand, pulling her towards him. They were now fighting. When he rose to his knees, forcing her to bend backward, Eroth watched him closely. A shiver went through her. She grazed quick fingers near the sensitive tip of his ear; his head snapped back, and he said half-laughing, half-serious, “nay, not there.” This opportunity was all she needed to pull away, but he reached for her elbow and twisted her arm behind her back. She pretended to nip at his finger. He released her. They were both laughing. Their movements were more feints than attacks, soft and graceful and lazy, until the forewarnings of their motions disappeared, until they could no longer read each other’s eyes, and their instincts flared and consciousness tightened and drew inward.

Eroth fought as her father taught her, in the same way he taught her to entwine courtesy with deceit, sinuous and unpredictable, full of false moves and feints that were not feints but real. After a chimerical strike at him she knew she gained the upper-hand. In challenge she placed a hand loose behind her back, quite deliberately, smiling. It was a show of superiority. Even while her other fingers crept to Legolas’ throat, she murmured complacently, holding his gaze, “the maiden has overexerted her pretty limbs.” But Legolas snatched her hand away.

“Said maiden is like a double-edged blade.”

“How so?”

“When you are strong you feign weakness, and when you are weak you feign strength.”

Eroth drew out her dagger. With it a silent thrill rippled through them. Their senses were pitched higher now, their breaths quickened. Thin metal whistled near Legolas’ side and he brushed it away, quick as a viper. Her blade arced in and out of the meeting of their motions, cleanly dipping and slicing, always with its flat side tilted against skin. No blood would be drawn. Legolas, at a disadvantage, began to fight in earnest. He moved mercurial as a river, and his evasions were sharp. Finally he flicked her wrist hard and caught the dagger’s hilt, with the other hand bearing down and pinning her arm over her head. Strained, Eroth arched her back but he changed his grip and rendered this ineffectual. With the slightest touch of the blade to her neck the game would be over. So she changed tactics – she lay back. Unresisting, going limp as a lizard in the sun, she looked up at him with heavy eyes, as if fatigue was beginning to take her. She smiled tiredly, sweetly. Not warranting attack but not admitting defeat either.

Legolas stopped, his body still tense, the white blade in his hand yet poised before the sealing act. Eroth touched fingers to her mouth, half-covering it, affecting a delicate yawn.

With a sigh of frustration, the ellon withdrew the blade and laid down on his back beside her. He would leave it unresolved. Their senses still smouldered residually. Their muscles were coiled. Pale and glimmering, swallows wheeled overhead. Watching this, attuned closely to each other from their grappling, they listened to their breaths drift out of synchrony. And they grew calm.

Faintly, rolling toward them like a mist, came the sound of song. Eroth turned her cheek to the side, bright eyes passing over him. Her smile was dimpled. “That would be from Rivendell.”

***

They turned up at the Last Homely Home in the afternoon looking wild and bedraggled. Such was the toll their journey took that the elf who came to greet them raised an eyebrow and advised them to remove their shoes. Clad in velvet, his robes glowing golden-brown in the sunlight, he had walked down the long steps bearing two goblets of a clear amber draught.

There lay the great valley, shadowy and wind-ruffled. There rose the pale bridges and arched lattices. There fell, immense, sunlit, the great waterfall which submerged the bright air in water-mist. Some strange magic flowed from within. It came over them, and they were at peace.

The elf placed his hand on his chest and inclined his head. He knew their names. “ _Mae g’ovannen,_ Eroth daughter of Balthoron. _Mae g’ovannen,_ Legolas Thranduilion. Drink.”

They climbed the stone steps and passed through long cool eaves, where elves came and went cupping the flames of candles against the breeze, lighting the lamps for dusk.

“We have a new fruit,” the elf was saying, in the manner of someone introducing a wonderful invention, “some rangers gave us the seeds last year and we planted them, not expecting anything, and it was wondrous.”

He turned toward them, an eyebrow again quirked. “They kept growing – we thought this was some strange spell, that they’d overwhelm all the peonies and daylilies and never stop. But now they seem to have ripened… Speaking of which,” he materialised from his sleeve a flaming daylily and gave it to Eroth, “for your hair.”

“The hospitality of Imladris is warm indeed.”

The elf indicated their path with a sweep of his robes.

“The lord Elrond is fond of guests from far places. Come with me.”

In the shady recess of a garden, encircled within stone pillars, they came upon a tangle of white peonies and drooping daylilies, and on the ground large round orbs with thick green skin and green leaves, which Eroth conjectured to be fruit. The elf, who for some reason they trusted immensely, cracked open such a secret orb with his sword hilt. The core was red and rough, dotted with black seeds.

“The rangers call it watermelon.”

“Water-friend?”

“Nay. Water _melon.”_

Legolas accepted the slice, bemused. “I see.”

“You are welcome to all the fruit growing on the trees and on the ground. You are welcome to our bridges and our fountains, our high places and low caverns, our land and our water. You are especially welcome to any secret gardens – if you can find them.”

The elf lifted a hand in farewell. “Let your hearts be light and unburdened. Here, you are safe.”

Then he was gone. The garden was silent and twilit. As a wind passed through the pillars it seemed to ripple all over, just a little, the leaves in the rosebushes and flower-clusters turning softly over and then falling back into inertia. Dazed, tired, they walked as if in a dream to a shadowed alcove at the end of the garden and sat down. The stone seat curved like a crescent around the edges. Eroth curled her legs up, leaning her cheek upon her friend’s shoulder. The watermelon had been fresh and sweet upon the tongue, and tinged their fingertips with fragrance. They watched a pale moon rise.

_Remember the pavilion at dusk_

_I was drunken, the path forgotten_

_After mirth,_

_I went to my raft,_

_Was lost deep in the lilies._

An elleth in silver-grey raiment, bearing an orange lantern, was coming toward them through the ivy-vines. When she caught their gaze she laughed with real mirth, though they were strangers, and went on singing:

_In haste, in haste, I rowed:_

_The sunlight was in embers._

_And hey, lo –_

_Up flew a flock of lake-birds!_

She broke off and said: “It is the time for bathing! Go through the long pergola and up stone steps! The lady turns to the left, the lord to the right. Your rooms are ready, and when night comes they’ll be full of moonlight.” She gave to them the lantern. “I will not lead you there. I wish to stay and sit awhile.”

As they left the garden she went into the green shadows of the alcove. They heard another song, winding itself through the dark whispering roses, deep and low and melancholic:

_‘Twas wind thick, rain thin_

_Slumber didn’t drain my wine-ache_

_The one who undraped the beads,_

_To her I spake –_

_She answered, still open are the sea-flowers_

_But know you not?_

_Know you not?_

_‘Tis green thick, red thin._

***

The bathing-place was a hollow in the ground through which a warm spring of water gurgled up, thickly shaded by bamboo all around. Someone had set beside it a silver pitcher of hot water with a handle wrought into a swan’s head. Eroth came through from her room, shrugging off her dirty tunic and slacks with distaste and left them lying on the floor, vowing how she would never sink below that level of cleanliness again. Drawing apart the whispering white drapes, she saw the steaming bath already drawn and laughed, and then her glance fell upon the beautiful pitcher and she nearly wept.

For a long time she bathed with her eyes closed, thoroughly, languorously. Half-dreaming she saw that the deep green of the bamboo mingled in the water with the warm light of the lamps swaying in the wind, so that the pool seemed to be filled with sea plants, writhing in incorporeal tendrils beneath it all. Eroth wanted to hear the elleth’s song again. _Know you not? But know you not?_ She murmured this under her breath, and then splashed her face with water.

When she came back into the room, back through the white drapes, there was an evening dress folded neatly on the wicker chair. Wringing out wetness from her hair, she came closer. The material was dark with woven silver threads and shot with beads like dew, and upon it was laid a silver circlet with a small murky gem. She had never seen such craftsmanship. A small bronze mirror hung by a piece of string from the wall, and in this she tried it on with the stone cold upon her brow, where within the flameless shadows her eyes stared back ambiguously – two grey fishes darting away into darker water. Recalling this darkness she lit the many candles on the tall candelabra. Her skin was dry now so she slipped on the evening dress. It too delighted and disturbed her. It was so beautiful that joy must have been in the hands that made it – _yet how cold it was! How impersonally it fell smooth!_ Its many woven beads shivered and clinked softly. She raised her arm; the long diaphanous sleeve fell with a sigh to the ground. Curious, she twirled her hand, and it draped thrice around her forearm like an antic shadow. She turned; where the yellow light pooled, she had caught sight of a book upon the bed.

It was a traveller’s journal – judging by the handwritten scrawls on the leather-bound cover. She picked up the volume, whereupon a note dropped onto her lap. It read:

A fitting work for a subject to one who is said to be King of the Woodland Realm and of the Secret Places of this Middle-earth. Merry reading and a merry feast.

\- _Gi nathlam hí_ , your host

***

The feast for the evening was set on a stone dais in a circle of low sighing poplars, suffused in the sweet clandestine heat. Later, after everyone else had taken their seats, the elleth of Greenwood came in, paused to look at the moon gleaming through the trees, and tucked one ankle over the other quiescently. At this feast were travellers from distant lands, sullen rangers who hailed from the moors, mortal men that had been to war who, when the light struck down and trembled metallic in her hair, wanted to call her _pretty creature_ , _pretty fool._ Who were used to dividing Woman into whores and prudes, silly girls and old wretches, but could not try and parse her; used to carving each other up into saint and damned, but it was she who said with her eyes, _I could dissect you if I wished, would that I were not indifferent._

The ellyth of Imladris, who seemed to say the same, were reclining on their stone benches. With their tinkling laughter, their dresses tinged with the bluish shades of poplars, they greeted her in their silvery voices: _the latest guest has to play! Come, music and more music!_ and a ranger amongst them half-rose saying _, if she does not know how, do not force her_.

But the newcomer smiled at this and raised a hand so that they quietened. She went and sat by the harp in the centre of the dais. For a moment then she hesitated, thoughtful. And then she bent her head and made a small cut in the gloomy permanence of the evening quiet. Little by little she fought against the stillness, broke it into pieces, shards of song, with the moth-like drift of her hands… here an elf entered and stood listening, who was lean and fair, seeming to bring in as she had brought the wilderness outside, the low echoes of the trees… and without warning, without any whispered word, not even of _come with me,_ or _be not afraid,_ she had led them to another land, an underland, roiling and skyless and misted over with sweet yellow harpsong. They followed this but couldn’t grasp it, and they followed it deeper. On a whim she took the tune to its lowest timbre. Under this music her entire being opened softly, without anybody noticing, for the men observed with their eyes only – but who could blame them? The strange elleth with her warrior’s braids and silver arms was too secretive, made one want to catch hold of her and shake her and demand she yield up the truth of her words, her ephemeral loveliness, her mocking mouth – and there she sat unreachable in her grey silken dress and upon her pale brow that circlet and that stone, cool, dusky, and aqueous. A dark flower blossoming in the night.

So fascinated by this vision were they, so caught up in the fantasy which they had woven around her to trap her, that only did they recover when she stopped and remarked, abruptly: “this harp is finely tuned.” Someone cried out, _another song! A merry song!_ But she laughed and shook her head. “I do not play often. It saddens me that the music has to end, especially merry music, so I would rather not start it in the first place.”

After that she fell silent and looked around with disinterested eyes. Her glance met the ellon’s and she went still, very still, which was curious, and then she turned away.

***

A starless night had fallen. The moon, which used to be a faint face turned away, now cut a white gash in the darkness. Eroth watched this wound with her cheek pressed to the cold neck of the harp. She was surrounded by ghostly goblets whose contents had been drained by strangers whose names she would never know. They littered the ground like weeds. Everyone had retired to their beds, which she much preferred. The world at this hour seemed to fall apart in sadness. And how gorgeous sadness looked in the moonlight.

The elleth set a finger upon the harpstring. She rasped it up and down, sensing the sinew, and plucked out a weave of tune. Always she touched the string to still it, sly hands never allowing a note to complete itself. The dying music pleaded against her skin. She paused, listening to its residues, ever-so-faint as gossamer. Then, without thinking, sounded out a note low and long and sang, as someone had taught her to long ago, _dear, deep-end your heart._ But she grew impatient of this, and dropped her chin back to the harp.

A voice roused her. “I had not heard you play since that morn in winter.”

“That tune – I have forgotten it since.”

She flicked a finger at the strings, not kindly, leaving in the air between them a low bitter reverberation. Legolas crossed the dais and caught her hands between his own. His eyes were warm as the shadows. Hers were cold as moonlight.

He said, “it makes you mournful. Leave it.”

She glanced back to the harp, yearning and hating. As if it called to her. His fingers nicked her chin, making her look at him again. “ _Mellon nin._ ”

How gorgeous it looked in the moonlight. The blue leaves of the trees, the white and dark of stone steps. How still he kept his fingers upon her skin. Yet how incomplete this place seemed after song.

“Leave it?” But somewhere she found it in herself to laugh. “Where then do you plan on taking me, Legolas Thranduilion?”

**Songs**

_Teardrop_ by _Massive Attack_

 _Mothership_ by _Aurora_

**A/N:**

For the elleth’s songs – I’ve gotten into translating old Chinese poems. Both are by Li Qing Zhao. She’s got a sad history, but she also wrote about partying a lot. It’s a really, really loose translation & I didn’t do them justice at all – the originals are dreamy, and sad, and surreal and also very much hungover.


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